The manufactured nostalgia of Trump's tariffs

[TimFitz]

Many Trump supporters are celebrating his new tariffs on the hope that they’ll make America great again by bringing manufacturing back to the U.S.
[…]
The problem is: those who credit manufacturing jobs for a glorious past America mistake correlation for causation. They think their parents and grandparents had the “good life” because of jobs in manufacturing. In reality, their parents and grandparents had that life because of unions, pensions, high marginal tax rates, and strong social policies — with a little post-War exceptionalism and a lot of racism and sexism thrown in.

Opinion | There's something big missing from Trump's post-war manufacturing fantasy

Those who credit manufacturing jobs for a glorious past America mistake correlation for causation.

www.msnbc.com

And Republicans oppose much of what made the ‘good life’ in the idealized past: unions, pensions, high marginal tax rates, and strong social policies.

This is largely true.

While Trump bellows that we had a great economy between 1872 and 1938, he ignores, or probably doesn't know that there were several depressions during that period. 1873, 1893, the railroad panic of 1901, the Bankers Panic of 1908, and the Great Depresssion.

He also neglects to mention that the " good life" didn't happen until these industries were unionized. Before that, working people lived in slums and rooming houses and worked twelve hours a day for six days a week.

Republicans have always opposed every measure that benefitted the middle class.

 

[TimFitz]

The manufacturing coming back will not be going to high regulation/union blue states.....They will still be rusting away, all back of the bus, while red RtW states see the bulk of investment.

I worked for DuPont for 20 years here in RtW Virginia, made damn good money, all the OT I wanted, and we were never union......Never even considered it.

Of course not. Every business that was around you either paid union wages or matched them.

 

[1srelluc]

Of course not. Every business that was around you either paid union wages or matched them.

Nope, no union plants in the county I was aware of....Can't say about wages.....DuPont in my AO was a very hard plant to get a job at. Great pay and benefits.

 

[OhPleaseJustQuit]

Did you have something to say? Or just name calling. You Trumpsters don't have much left besides adolescent attacks these days.

It has been months since I've seen a Trump cultist try and make an intelligent fact based argument.

 

[braalian]

We also had 2 parent families with the wife raising the kids. Now you loons has screwed the pooch so bad. It takes two parents working full time jobs, just to make ends meet.

No, people just choose to live beyond their means

Part of the reason families where able to have a stay at home mom and only one income was because they economized

They only had one car, mom budgeted groceries carefully and made a lot from scratch. Going out to a restaurant- even McDonald’s or KFC- was a monthly treat, not a regular thing. Kids weren’t gifted ridiculous amounts of crap.

People could do all this today. They choose not to.

 

[Correll]

.

There needs to be a process here in the board by which we can vote out those who state something as fact and then refuse to prove it so.

That one would go really fast.


.

Or at least to even TRY.

 

[Correll]

I took it to mean that racism is a core value of Trumpism.

That's not what he said.

He cited it as part of a list of what "good" in the 50s, generally considered an American Golden Age.

I'm asking him why he thinks of that as something positive.

 

[g5000]

This article is well worth reading in its entirety.

Some excerpts:

I’ve been in the manufacturing industry for 15 years. I’ve manufactured in the US and in China. I worked in a factory in China. I speak and read Chinese. I’ve purchased millions of dollars' worth of goods from the US and China, but also Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Cambodia. I’ve also visited many factories in Mexico and consider myself a student of how countries rise and fall.

In other words, unlike many who have voiced an opinion on this topic, I know what I am talking about.

1. They’re not high enough​

[snip]

In short, manufacturing in the United States is so expensive, and our supply chain (we’ll explain that next) is so bad that making that iPhone in the United States without that 54 percent tariff would still cost more than in China with a 54 percent tariff. Since it still costs less to make the iPhone in China, both Apple and consumers would prefer it be made there, so it will, and not in the USA.

2. America’s industrial supply chain for many products is weak​

[snip]

When it comes to the iPhone, all the factories that make the needed components are in Asia, which is one reason why, even with a 54 percent tariff, it’s cheaper to assemble that iPhone in China than in the United States. It’s cheaper and faster to get those components from nearby factories in Asia than it is to get them from the US, which, because said factories no longer exist here, has to buy these components from Asia anyway.

Supply chains sound complicated but aren’t. If you can’t get the components you need at a reasonable price and timeline to build a finished product, it doesn’t matter what the tariffs are, you have to import it, because you can’t build it locally.

3. We don’t know how to make it​

[snip]

My company makes educational toys from plastic called Brain Flakes. To make Brain Flakes, you melt plastic and force it into shaped metal molds. Were we to import the machines and molds needed to do this, it would work for a little while, but as soon as one of those molds broke, we’d be in trouble, because there are almost no moldmakers left in the United States. The people who knew how to build and repair molds have either passed away or are long retired. In the event of a problem, we’d have to order a new mold from China or send ours back, shutting down production for months.

People trivialize the complexity and difficulty of manufacturing when it’s really hard. And if we don’t know how to make something, it doesn’t matter what the tariff is. It won’t get made in America.

4. The effective cost of labor in the United States is higher than it looks​

[snip]

Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.

In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.

Chinese workers are much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60 percent of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.

And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.

Chinese workers work longer hours more happily, and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.

Sadly, what I describe above are not theoretical situations. These are things that I have experienced or seen with my own eyes.

[snip]

5. We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture​

The inputs to manufacturing are not just materials, labor, and knowhow. You need infrastructure like electricity and good roads for transportation, too.

Since the year 2000, US electricity generation per person has been flat. In China, over the same time period, it has increased 400 percent. China generates over twice as much electricity per person today as the United States. Why?

Manufacturing.

To run the machines that make the products we use, you need electricity, a lot of it. We already have electricity instability in this country. Without the construction of huge amounts of new energy infrastructure, like nuclear power plants, we cannot meaningfully increase our manufacturing output.

[snip]

Paving more roads, modernizing our seaports, improving our airports, speeding up our train terminals, and building power plants in the costliest nation in the world to build is a huge undertaking that people are not appreciating when they say “well, we’ll just make it in America.”

6. Made in America will take time​

[snip]

It takes at least, in the most favorable of jurisdictions, two years (if you can get the permits) to build a factory in the United States. I know because I’ve done it. From there, it can take six months to a year for it to become efficient. It can take months for products to come off the assembly lines. All this ignores all the infrastructure that will need to be built (new roads, new power plants, etc.) to service the new factory.

7. Uncertainty and complexity around the tariffs​

8. Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing​

Americans want less crime, good schools for their kids, and inexpensive health care.

They don’t want to be sewing shirts.

The people most excited about this new tariff policy tend to be those who’ve never actually made anything, because if you have, you’d know how hard the work is.

9. The labor does not exist to make good products​

There are over a billion people in China making stuff. As of right now there are 12 million people looking for work in the United States (4 percent unemployment). Ignoring for a moment the comparative inefficiency of labor and the billions of people making products outside of China, where are the people who are going to do these jobs? Do you simply say “make America great again” three times and they will appear with the skills needed to do the work?

And where are the managers to manage these people? One of the reasons why manufacturing has declined in the United States is a brain drain toward sectors that make more money. Are people who make money on the stock market, in real estate, in venture capital, and in startups going to start sewing shirts? It’s completely and totally unrealistic to assume that people will move from superficially high productivity sectors driven by US Dollar strength to products that are low on the value chain.

10. Automation will not save us​

[snip]


First, China, on a yearly basis, installs 7x as many industrial robots as we do in the United States. Second, Chinese robots are cheaper.

[snip]

It’s unlikely that American ingenuity will be able to counter the flood of Chinese industrial robots that is coming. The first commercially electrical vehicle was designed and built in the United States, but today China is dominating electric vehicle manufacturing across the world. Industrial robots will likely be the same story.

11. Robots and overseas factory workers don’t file lawsuits, but Americans do​

12. Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated​

Imagine two companies that import goods into the United States. One is based in China, while the other is based in the United States. They both lie about the value of their goods so that they have to pay less tariffs.

What happens to the China company? Perhaps they lose a shipment when it’s seized by the US government for cheating, but they won’t pay additional fines because they’re in China, where they’re impervious to the US legal system.

What happens to the USA company? Owners go to prison.

Who do you think is going to cheat more on tariffs, the China or the US company?

Exactly.

13. The tariff policies are structured in the wrong way​

Why didn’t the jobs come back in 2018 when we initiated our last trade war? We applied tariffs; why didn’t it work?

Instead of making America great, we made Vietnam great.

When the United States applied tariffs to China, it shifted huge amounts of manufacturing to Vietnam, which did not have tariffs applied to it. Vietnam, which has a labor force that is a lot more like China’s than the United States’, was able to use its proximity to China for its supply chain and over the past seven or so years, slowly developed its own. With Vietnamese wages even lower than Chinese wages, instead of the jobs coming to the United States, they just went to Vietnam instead.

We’re about to make the same mistake again, in a different way.

14. Michael Jordan sucked at baseball​

America is the greatest economic power of all time. We’ve got the most talented people in the world, and we have a multi-century legacy of achieving what so many other countries could not.

Michael Jordan is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, perhaps even the greatest athlete of all time.

He played baseball in his youth. What happened when he switched from basketball to baseball? He went from being an MVP champion to being a middling player in the minor leagues. Two years later, he was back to playing basketball.

And that’s exactly what’s going to happen to us.

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

8. Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing

And it’s appropriate for Americans to hate manufacturing.

Indeed, the type of jobs Trump wants to ‘bring back’ are jobs we shouldn’t want back.

We should be investing in education and training for 21st century jobs, not wasting resources to ‘bring back’ 19th century jobs.

 

[80zephyr]

And it’s appropriate for Americans to hate manufacturing.

Indeed, the type of jobs Trump wants to ‘bring back’ are jobs we shouldn’t want back.

We should be investing in education and training for 21st century jobs, not wasting resources to ‘bring back’ 19th century jobs.

Enough coding jobs for all Americans?

 

[g5000]

Trump stated the facts in 1992.

TRUMP: I like the challenge and tell the story of the coal miner’s son. The coal miner gets black-lung disease, his son gets it, then his son . If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines. But most people don’t have the imagination–or whatever–to leave their mine. They don’t have “it.”

PLAYBOY: Which is?

TRUMP: “It” is an ability to become an entrepreneur, a great athlete, a great writer. You’re either born with it or you’re not.


Those are the true feelings Trump has toward his supporters, and why he knows he can con them forever.

 

[jbrownson0831]

And it’s appropriate for Americans to hate manufacturing.

Indeed, the type of jobs Trump wants to ‘bring back’ are jobs we shouldn’t want back.

We should be investing in education and training for 21st century jobs, not wasting resources to ‘bring back’ 19th century jobs.

Wow, totally braindead kook drivel. Totally unAmerican.

 

[Harry Dresden]

Wow, totally braindead kook drivel. Totally unAmerican.

its jones...the guy who has an opinion but is to much of a pussy to come in to the thread and defend his bullshit,he lets his little buddies do his talking...

 

[MisterBeale]

I'm still waiting for someone, anyone, to tell me why it is just fine for other nations to tariff U.S. products, manipulate their currency, and give all sorts of subsidies to their producers, but yet. . . it is a crime against nature for the U.S. to do the same. . .

 

[Thinker101]

Dang, who knew China had so many talented people making such reliable products. You'd think they wouldn't need to steal intellectual property.

 

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

8. Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing​

Americans want less crime, good schools for their kids, and inexpensive health care.

They don’t want to be sewing shirts.

The people most excited about this new tariff policy tend to be those who’ve never actually made anything, because if you have, you’d know how hard the work is.

This.

Who is going to work these jobs? Factory work sucks and people don't want to do it. I don't get this obsession among Trumpistas with bringing back 19th century sweat shops. Leave those jobs for the Third World. We should be revamping our education system and preparing today's kids for the economies of the future in technology.

 

[MisterBeale]

This.

Who is going to work these jobs? Factory work sucks and people don't want to do it. I don't get this obsession among Trumpistas with bringing back 19th century sweat jobs. Leave those jobs for the Third World. We should be revamping our education system and preparing today's kids for the economies of the future in technology.

I've been a server, I've been a clerk and construction worker. . . and I have worked in manufacturing.

You are both full of shit, and you don't know what you are talking about.




The lower classes would far rather work in manufacturing than behind the counter at a Quick Stop or in Walmart.

. . . unless they can do those jobs w/o dealing with the public?

. . if you knew any of these folks, you would know why a good portion of them can't be trained to do white collar jobs.

We will never, EVER, have a society where the majority of the nation does high tech jobs. Nor will any other nation for that matter.

 

[dudmuck]

I'm still waiting for someone, anyone, to tell me why it is just fine for other nations to tariff U.S. products, manipulate their currency, and give all sorts of subsidies to their producers, but yet. . . it is a crime against nature for the U.S. to do the same. . .

its because the numbers arent based on foreign trade barriers.

 

[g5000]

Enough coding jobs for all Americans?

We are at full employment. It's funny how Trump's cult does not notice he came into office on third base.

And now he's trying to destroy all that.

 

[MisterBeale]

its because the numbers arent based on foreign trade barriers.

It matters little whether they are proportional or not. If Tariffs are wrong, they are wrong.

This doesn't answer WHY we have let other nations do this to us for so long.